lloyd haft has written a few blog entries that resonated pretty deeply with me on the experience of studying chinese. he's also included some great quotes that reassure me despite my feelings of inadequacy translating chinese. i recommend reading all of his entries tagged "scrapbook."
the first quote reminds me of a conversation casey and i had (one that i've had on several other occasions with several other people) after i told him about a great passage i read by mo yan likening something (i don't remember what) to tracks impressed on wet sand by a crab scampering off. it had to do with creating words that might capture a sentiment, rather than finding that specific word that carries the exact meaning for a specific thing, or an exact translation.
here are some of the quotes i liked most...
"As for the criticism that might be made of a translator ‘superimposing’ such an individually distinctive style of his own on a Chinese poet, hence obscuring his supposedly unique language – I wonder how many of us sinologists, or how many Chinese readers, could reliably tell the diction of one classical Chinese poet from another in the original." full entry
[On his first translations] "My knowledge of Chinese was pitifully inadequate, but this did not deter me from doing the best I could with Bian’s poetry. I took comfort in the words of T. S. Eliot (one of the writers whom Bian translated): ‘I was passionately fond of certain French poetry long before I could have translated two verses of it correctly.’ " full entry
"I remember once many years ago when my colleague the Polish sinologist Zbigniew Słupski was asked by a British editor how much time he would realistically need to write a decent scholarly article on one of the great traditional Chinese novels. Zbigniew took a sip of vodka, peered meditatively into the distance, and said: ‘Three lifetimes. One to learn Chinese, one to read the whole novel, and one to write and revise the article.’ " full article
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